The Chief Executive Officer, Airtel Nigeria, Mr. Rajan Swaroop, has said the telecoms company is not interested in buying the mobile business of MultilinksTelkom.

Swaroop, who disclosed this in an exclusive interview with our correspondent in Lagos, said the company had never expressed interest in buying the CDMA company and was not in talks with Telkom of South Africa over its sale.

He said, “We are not a CDMA operator and we are not interested in buying Multilinks. We are not in talks with Telkom over this and we are not planning to do so in the future. We are a GSM company and our focus is to continue to offer excellent and affordable services to our subscribers.”

Telkom SA, last year announced its intention to halt the mobile operations of Multilinks, its Nigerian subsidiary.

The Acting Chief Executive Officer, MultilinksTelkom, Mr. Vincent Reseroka, said the decision was made in the wake of the company’s continuous poor financial performance.

Reseroka said Telkom SA would exit the CDMA mobile operation of Multilinks in the next six months and concentrate on fixed operations.

There had, however, been speculations that Airtel and Etisalat had, at different times, expressed interests in buying the CDMA service provider. But Swaroop reiterated that Airtel would not buy Multilinks.

The Group Chief Operating Officer, Globacom, Mr. Mohamed Jameel, had said the company had no intention of buying Multilinks’ mobile business.

“Globacom is investing in terms of huge network expansion but as at now, we are not talking to anybody about buying any company,” he had said.

A source at Visafone, who asked not to be named because he was not authorised to speak on the matter, had also said that the CDMA company had no plan to buy Multilinks.

A senior Multilinks’ official, had told our correspondent in confidence that Telkom SA had kept the discussion around the sale of the troubled CDMA company in secret.

According to him, nobody in Nigeria can claim to know much about the proposed sale of Multilinks.

“The purchase of the company had been linked with a number of operators but no one knows who is really in discussion with Telkom over the sale of Mukltilinks. Some of us are also waiting to see the outcome to know whether it will benefit us or not. This will determine the decision we are going to take.” he said.

Multilinks, Starcomms, ZOOMmobile and Visafone, the CDMA companies operating in Nigeria, have been faced with financial losses and poor performance in the last three years.

This had necessitated the plan to sell Multilinks by its South African owner while others have continued to count their losses in silence.

For instance, the four CDMA operators lost about N1.95bn in the first six months of 2010, owing to the loss of 1.08 million subscribers within the same period.

Based on the N1,800 Average Revenue Per User of telecoms services in Nigeria released by the National Bureau of Statistics, an average of N1.95bn must have been lost on 1.08 million subscribers by the Nigerian CDMA operators in the first half of the year.